What?
Currently, there are four biological recipes that are similar to kovarex enrichment, in that they produce a surplus of one of their input items. However, all of them have one trait in common: Their outputs are always 100% fresh.Of course, if the outputs inherited freshness from all of their ingredients, then the stockpile of catalysts would unavoidably spoil away over time. This is why they have this property. But I believe that making ingredient freshness not a factor in these recipes makes for less interesting gameplay.
I think that instead of using the “Outputs are always fresh” property, a new property should be added: “Ignore freshness of specific ingredients”. This way, the freshness of the output wouldn’t inherit the freshness of the catalyst, but it would inherit the freshness of the input ingredient, which players would actually have control over.
Why?
I got this idea while remembering the fact that the old agricultural science recipes used nutrients as an ingredient. This way, the freshness of the science pack would depend on the freshness of nutrients, an item that spoils quite quickly.However, the current recipe uses pentapod eggs instead. I believe this was a very positive change overall, but I also think it isn’t perfect. Pentapod eggs always come out 100% fresh, meaning you can feed them with your standard nutrients and get the same result as with pristine nutrients. I think it would be nice to bring back that previous challenge of needing fresh nutrients for science, it would make Gleba just that much better.
This change would also affect fish breeding and bacteria cultivation, in ways I believe would be interesting. If you fed your bacteria with really old bioflux, there may be a chance that the bacteria that comes out would spoil before the next cycle of the recipe could complete. I think it’s a great opportunity to make final freshness matter more, as currently it only matters for science. Rocket parts and quality can be fed with very spoiled items and still work perfectly. Fish breeding would only be minimally affected. The best food source for fish are biter eggs, which are always created fully fresh. So almost nothing would change at all.
I just hope the implementation of this isn’t too much of a hassle on the technical side. But if this new recipe property were added, I could see it being quite useful to modders.